But when things don't work as I expect, it's far more efficient to be able to view the code on both sides, rather than only on my own side and try to guess what the other side is doing.
Besides the usual suspect of wrong understanding on my end leading to misuse, this can also be due to lacking or wrong documentation of the other system, or bugs in the other system due to unexpected inputs or similar.
Like just a few days ago we spent an unreasonable amount of time with an API of one of our customers, where we would get empty list back for some of our queries. Turned out something in their service crashed when handed national characters, despite accepting JSON and hence UTF-8 input and nothing in the documentation about English letters only. Rather than returning 400 or 500, the service returned 200 with an empty list, leading us to assume we did something wrong.
> But when things don't work as I expect, it's far more efficient to be able to view the code on both sides, rather than only on my own side and try to guess what the other side is doing.
Are you able to view the source code of your platform vendor? Everyone is at some level dependent on Black box APIs.
If you can document where with certain input you don’t get the expected output, you reach out to the team that is responsible for it whether internally or externally and they either explain it or they fix it.
This is the API service I’ve been working with over the past five+ years - three actually working at AWS (Professional Services).
But when things don't work as I expect, it's far more efficient to be able to view the code on both sides, rather than only on my own side and try to guess what the other side is doing.
Besides the usual suspect of wrong understanding on my end leading to misuse, this can also be due to lacking or wrong documentation of the other system, or bugs in the other system due to unexpected inputs or similar.
Like just a few days ago we spent an unreasonable amount of time with an API of one of our customers, where we would get empty list back for some of our queries. Turned out something in their service crashed when handed national characters, despite accepting JSON and hence UTF-8 input and nothing in the documentation about English letters only. Rather than returning 400 or 500, the service returned 200 with an empty list, leading us to assume we did something wrong.